Re: Gnome Tracker (tracker-miner-fs-3) behaving badly

[indieterminacy <indieterminacy@libre.brussels>]

On 18-08-2022 11:08, Ekaitz Zarraga wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, August 18th, 2022 at 2:50 AM, Ben Sturmfels via 
> <help-guix@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Hi Folks!
>> 
>> I really like the idea of Gnome Tracker - index all your files,
>> contacts, etc. so you can quickly search them. It just doesn't seem to
>> work properly, it uses a lot of resources and it's behaviour is
>> opaque. I'm not sure whether this is the configuration in Guix System,
>> or whether Tracker just isn't well designed. My hunch is that it's a
>> design problem. Does anyone have good/bad experience with Tracker
>> outside of Guix?
>> 
>> Specific issues:
>> 
>> * the tracker-miner-fs-3 process runs spontaneously consuming at least
>> one CPU for a few minutes (I haven't kept track of how long or how
>> often)
>> 
>> * after all this scanning, searching in Gnome Activities doesn't
>> display any matches for the contents of files, only the filenames -
>> I thought indexing the contents was the whole point
>> 
>> * when it's busy, tracker-miner-fs-3 seems to ignore `kill` (SIGTERM)
>> and needs `kill -9` (SIGKILL) to kill it
>> 
>> * it's not clear exactly what files Tracker is indexing - there 
>> doesn't
>> appear to be a log - I'd really like to be able to just `tail -f` to
>> see what's going on
>> 
>> I'd like to also understand how tracker-miner-fs-3 is started by
>> Gnome. It seems to start automatically and restart after some time if
>> killed. It doesn't seem to be listed under "Startup Applications" in
>> Gnome Tweak Tool.
>> 
>> Debugging Tracker:
>> 
>> After killing it with `pkill --full tracker-miner-fs-3 --echo`, I can
>> restart it with some debugging information using:
>> 
>> env TRACKER_DEBUG=config,miner-fs-events,monitors,statistics,status 
>> /gnu/store/[...]-tracker-miners-3.3.1/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
>> 
>> This seems to show some scheduling information about the indexing, but
>> not exactly what it's indexing.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Ben
> 
> 
> I experienced a very similar situation.
> I hate hen it happens. Every time I move a file or I rename something 
> the thing starts to run and my cpu goes crazy.
> On the other hand, this is a recent problem, in previous versions it 
> didn't happen and I didn't really have more effort searching for files 
> in nautilus or similar applications. For me, it's just bad.
> 
> Also, I don't use GNOME directly, even if I have it installed and use 
> most of its apps, I run an i3 session, but tracker-miner is still 
> running.
> 
> I don't know if that helps.
> 
> If I could, I'd like to remove it.
> 
> Is it possible?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ekaitz

If I recall, Gnome Tracker uses Xapian as its backend.

I seem to have previously noticed alternative software which appears 
more performant (though I moved onto other activity so I cant confirm).

Is something like Redmine-Xapian a satisfactory alternative?
https://github.com/xelkano/redmine_xapian

Kind regards,

-- 
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels